September 2008: Chrome steals from IE, Firefox, and Opera

Internet Explorer dropped again by almost a whole percent: from 72.15 percent …

When Chrome arrived last month, we had mostly positive thoughts about what Google was bringing to the browser market. With a month gone by, it's time to see how well the new browser performed in September. We looked at how the browser market stood in August, so we've got a nice basis of comparison to see Chrome's impact.

Between the two months, Internet Explorer dropped by just over half a percent: from 72.15 percent to 71.52 percent. This is nothing new. What is new is that Firefox's growth was stunted: the most popular alternative browser dropped by 0.27 percent (from 19.73 percent to 19.46 percent), and Opera lost everything it grabbed in August: from 0.74 percent to 0.69 percent. These losses can be attributed mainly to Google Chrome, which managed to settle in at 0.78 percent, just ahead of Opera. Safari, on the other hand, continued its growth, grabbing 0.28 percent and moving from 6.37 percent to 6.65 percent. The market share pie for September 2008, according to Net Applications, looks like this:

While Chrome isn't as popular as it was on Ars a week after its release, it's still hovering around a respectable 5 percent, according to Google Analytics, and it's clear that the browser is here to stay. We'll see how Dean Hachamovitch's claims of users choosing IE8 over Chrome hold up when the next version of the world's most popular browser is released as early as next month.